| Summary: | Function words are known to be shorter than content words. I investigate the function words BE and HAVE (with its content word homonym) and show that more reduction, operationalized as word shortening or contraction, is found in some grammaticalized meanings of these words. The difference between the words’ uses cannot be attributed to differences in frequency or semantic weight. Instead I argue that these words are often shortened and reduced when they occur in constructions in which they are highly predictable. This suggests that particular grammaticalized uses of a word are stored with their own exemplar clouds of context-specific phonetic realizations. The phonetics of any instance of a word are then jointly determined by the exemplar cloud for that word and the particular context. A given instance of an auxiliary can be reduced either because it is predictable in the current context or because that use of the auxiliary usually occurs in predictable contexts. The effects cannot be attributed to frequency or semantic weight.
The present study compares function word production in the speech of school-aged children and their caregivers and in inter-adult speech. The effects of predictability in context and average predictability across contexts are replicated across the datasets. However, I find that as children get older their function words shorten relative to content words, even when controlling for increasing speech rate, showing that as their language experience increases they spend less time where it is not needed for comprehensibility. Caregivers spend less time on function words with older children than younger children, suggesting that they expect function words to be more difficult for younger interlocutors to decode than for older interlocutors. Additionally, while adults use either word shortening or contraction to increase the efficiency of speech, children tend to either use contraction and word shortening or neither until age seven, where they start to use one strategy or the other like adults. Young children with better vocabulary employ an adult-like strategy earlier, suggesting earlier onset of efficient yet effective speech behavior, namely allocating less signal to function words when they are especially easy for the listener to decode.
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